Historic Hood River
Preparing Salmon
Notes
I recently scanned this wonderful Edward Curtis photogravure of a Native woman preparing salmon for drying/ smoking. This image will be part of the museum’s exhibit on salmon which will be opening in February.
If you don’t recall my earlier primer on photogravure, it is a photographic process which makes a metal plate for printing an image on paper. A light sensitive gel emulsion controls how deeply an acid etches into a metal plate, creating little reservoirs for ink to sit in. The print is made my pressing a wet piece of special paper against the plate. The deeper etching holds more ink so the paper becomes darker in those regions, providing a very nice approximation of the continuous tone image you get with traditional photographic printing. You can click on the “photogravure” tag to see more examples.
nels
Wonderful study from the fish prep on a hide, to 2 baskets, and I’m sure a hand woven screen, to dress. Thanks Arthur.
Judy
This is simply wonderful! Keep up the good work!
ArthurB
This photogravure is in the museum collection. We removed it from a non-archival frame to properly conserve it. I took that opportunity to scan it so we can use the digital version for everyday access. I should note that our museum director thinks it is important that people get to see actual artifacts when they visit our collection. While a digital scan lets us print an image at a larger scale for use in an interpretive panel, we try to use the actual artifact in exhibits wherever possible.